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The EPA’s numbers show the biggest improvements in almost a decade, despite America’s thirst for ever-larger trucks and SUVs.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out with its annual Automotive Trends Report for 2022 model-year vehicles, and the numbers are some of the best it’s seen. Average emissions are at a record low and fuel economy is at a record high — and according to preliminary 2023-model-year data, those trends will continue into the new year.
Overall, the EPA says average real-world CO2 emissions for new vehicles sold in 2022 dropped by 10 grams of carbon dioxide per mile for an average of 337 g/mile, the lowest the agency has recorded. On the other side, fuel economy averages are at 26 miles per gallon, an improvement of 0.6 MPG and another record high for new vehicles sold.
Of the five categories of vehicles tested, four are the most fuel efficient the agency has seen since its inception, with crossovers (what the EPA classifies as “car SUVs”) showing the biggest drop in emissions at 27 g/mile, followed by pickup trucks, sedans/wagons, minivans, and SUVs.
The not-so-good-news is the EPA also recorded its highest number of SUVs, pickups, and minivans/vans sold since 1975, accounting for a whopping 63% of new vehicles that rolled off dealer lots. And across the board, 2022 vehicles were also the heaviest and largest ever sold.
This is primarily due to two things: First, automaker safety is at an all-time high, swelling cars with better crumple zones, dozens of airbags, and scads of active safety systems. Second, Americans just like big vehicles with more power — what the EPA calls “market trends.” That likely won’t change with 2023’s numbers.
Thankfully, there will be more EVs and hybrids coming to market, which should help to offset some of the emissions. Electrics helped reduce average emissions by 22 g/mile in 2022 and increased overall fuel economy by 1.2%, and projections for the next report show an even bigger boost to 26.9 MPG in 2023.
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We’re powering data centers every which way these days.
The energy giant ExxonMobil is planning a huge investment in natural gas-fired power plants that will power data centers directly, a.k.a. behind the meter, meaning they won’t have to connect to the electric grid. That will allow the fossil fuel giant to avoid making the expensive transmission upgrades that tend to slow down the buildout of new electricity generation. And it’ll add carbon capture to boot.
The company said in a corporate update that it plans to build facilities that “would use natural gas to generate a significant amount of high-reliability electricity for a data center,” then use carbon capture to “remove more than 90% of the associated CO2 emissions, then transport the captured CO2 to safe, permanent storage deep underground.” Going behind the meter means that this generation “can be installed at a pace that other alternatives, including U.S. nuclear power, cannot match,” the company said.
The move represents a first for Exxon, which is famous for its far-flung operations to extract and process oil and natural gas but has not historically been in the business of supplying electricity to customers. The company is looking to generate 1.5 gigawatts of power, about 50% more than a large nuclear reactor, The New York Timesreported.
Exxon’s announcement comes as thepower industry has reached an inflection point thanks to new demand from data centers to power artificial intelligence, electrification of transportation and heating, and new manufacturing investment. The demand for new power is immense, yet the industry’s ability to provide it quickly is limited both by the intermittent nature of cheap renewable power like solar and storage — plus the transmission capacity it requires — and by theregulatory barriers and market uncertainty around building new natural gas and nuclear power. While technology companies are starting to invest in bringing more nuclear power onto the grid,those projects won’t begin to bear fruit until the 2030s at the earliest.
Exxon is also not the only energy giant looking at behind-the-meter gas.
“This county is blessed with an abundance of natural gas,” Chevron chief executive Mike Wirthsaid at a recent event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “I think what we’re likely to see is that gas turbine generation is going to be a big part of the solution set, and a lot of it may be what’s called behind the meter … to support data centers.”
At the same time, the so-called hyperscalers are still making massive investments in renewables. Google, the investment firm TPG, and the energy developer Intersectannounced a $20 billion investment “to synchronize new clean power generation with data center growth in a novel way,” Google’s President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday.
While Google was a pioneer in developing new renewable power to offset emissions from its operations and recently formed a partnership with Microsoft and the steel company Nucor to foster energy technology that can deliver clean power 24/7, this new project will be focused on “co-locating grid-connected carbon-free energy and data center investments into closely-linked infrastructure projects.”
These projects — the data centers and the clean power generation — would be sited close to each other, however they would not be behind the meter, a Google executive told Canary Media. Instead, Intersect will build “new clean energy assets in regions and projects of interest,” according to the blog post, with Google then acting as an offtaker for the power “as an anchor tenant in the co-located industrial park that would support data center development.” The Google data center and the Intersect-built power “would come online alongside its own clean power, bringing new generation capacity to the grid to meet our load, reduce time to operation and improve grid reliability.”
“This partnership is an evolution of the way hyperscalers and power providers have previously worked together,” Sheldon Kimber, Intersect chief executive, said in a press release. “We can and are developing innovative solutions to rapidly expand clean power capacity at scale while reducing the strain on the grid.”
But ... how?
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday rocked the energy world when he promised “fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals” for “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America,” in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.
“GET READY TO ROCK!!!” he added.
Trump has frequently derided regulatory barriers to development, including in his announcements of various economic and policy roles in his upcoming administration. His designee for Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, for instance, will also head a
National Energy Council that will “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape … by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”
When Trump
announced his nomination of Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, he said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American business.”
Current interpretations of existing laws dictate that any project constituting a major federal action (e.g. one that uses public lands) must be reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act, the country’s signature permitting law. Federal courts are often asked in litigation to sign off on whether that review process — although not the outcome — was sufficient.
Regardless of any changes Trump may make to the federal regulatory system as president, that infrastructure is already in flux. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued a ruling that throws into doubt decades of NEPA enforcement. Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard a separate case on the limits of NEPA as it relates to aproposed rail line expansion to transport oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Although the court is unlikely to issue a decision until next year, its current membership has shown itself plenty willing to scrap longstanding precedent in the name of cutting the regulatory state down to size.
Trump did not support his announcement with any additional materials laying out the legal authorities he plans to exercise to exempt these projects from regulation or proposed legislation, but it already attracted criticism from environmentalists, with the Sierra Club describing it as a “plan to sell out communities and environment to the highest bidder.It’s also unclear whether Trump was referring to foreign direct investment in the United States, of which there was $177 billion in 2022,according to the Department of Commerce.
Trump’s appointed co-deregulator-in-chief, for one, approved of his message today. “This is awesome 🚀🇺🇸,” Elon Musk wrote on X in response.
Companies are racing to finish the paperwork on their Department of Energy loans.
Of the over $13 billion in loans and loan guarantees that the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has made under Biden, nearly a third of that funding has been doled out in the month since the presidential election. And of the $41 billion in conditional commitments — agreements to provide a loan once the borrower satisfies certain preconditions — that proportion rises to nearly half. That includes some of the largest funding announcements in the office’s history: more than $7.5 billion to StarPlus Energy for battery manufacturing, $4.9 billion to Grain Belt Express for a transmission project, and nearly $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian to support its new manufacturing facility in Georgia.
The acceleration represents a clear push by the outgoing Biden administration to get money out the door before President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to hollow out much of the Department of Energy, takes office. Still, there’s a good chance these recent conditional commitments won’t become final before the new administration takes office, as that process involves checking a series of nontrivial boxes that include performing due diligence, addressing or mitigating various project risks, and negotiating financing terms. And if the deals aren’t finalized before Trump takes office, they’re at risk of being paused or cancelled altogether, something the DOE considers unwise, to put it lightly.
“It would be irresponsible for any government to turn its back on private sector partners, states, and communities that are benefiting from lower energy costs and new economic opportunities spurred by LPO’s investments,” a spokesperson wrote to me in an email.
The once nearly dormant LPO has had a renaissance under the Biden administration and the office’s current director, Jigar Shah. The Inflation Reduction Act supercharged its lending authority to $400 billion, from just $40 billion when Biden took office. Then a week after the election, the office announced that it had recalibrated its risk estimates for the loan guarantees that it makes under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program, which works to modernize and repurpose existing energy infrastructure to make it cleaner and more energy efficient. As the office explained, these projects “may reflect a relatively moderate risk profile in comparison to typical projects LPO finances with higher project risk.” When there’s less risk involved, LPO doesn’t have to set aside as much money to cover a possible default, which in this case has allowed the office to more than quadruple its funding for qualifying projects.
It’s not just that LPO staffers are working fast, though that’s part of it — it’s also that loan beneficiaries have picked up their pace in responding to the LPO. As Shah emphasized today at the LPO’s second annual Demonstrate Deploy Decarbonize conference, finalizing conditional commitments largely depends on companies getting their ducks in a row as quickly as possible. “I do think that right now borrowers are sufficiently motivated to move more quickly than they have probably a year ago,” Shah said. “It's up to the borrowers. Our process hasn’t changed. Their ability to move through it faster is in their control.”
Shah noted that though timelines may be accelerating, the office’s due diligence procedures have remained the same. Thus far, the project that has moved the fastest from a conditional commitment to a finalized loan was for a clean hydrogen and energy storage facility in Utah. That took 43 days, and there are 46 left in Biden’s presidency. Let’s see what the LPO can do.